Pizza Hut Draws Attention With Viral Video

Pizza Hut has caused an uproar with the launch of a new viral advertising campaign. "Kicked Out of a Pizza Place," a video produced by Mediocre Films, has gotten 198,135 views on YouTube since it was posted less than five days ago. The fast food corporation is piggybacking on the success of other chains' attempt at viral videos, such as competitor Wendy's MySpace video, "Crazy Lettuce". The pizza parlor video, one of three in the viral campaign, is already attracting lots of attention — both for its humor and its tackiness. "If Pizza Hut were a person, I'd say it was a jerk," wrote Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, an Internet marketing agency.

While the video had me busting a gut, I also thought it was a slap in the face of family-owned businesses. More importantly, I question whether the campaign conveyed any meaningful (or positive) brand message to consumers about Pizza Hut. Watch the video below — I'd love to hear what you think.

I'm with everyone else - a complete waste of the local business owners' time and kindness. Add to it that these guys are OLD and not dumb juvenile kids. This makes Pizza Hut look like primetime A-holes. I hope the recession impacts their business negatively and local businesses thrive.

This is a terrible example of video marketing and Pizza Hut should be ashamed. They wasted 25k or whatever they spent on this and made themselves look stupid in the process. I can't believe they thought hiring these guys to bother small business owners would be a good idea. And I don't think 200k views in a week on YouTube actually qualifies as blowing up. 2 million views, now you're talking. Whatever. Pizza Hut probably lost business from this. I won't buy their pizza, that's for sure.

I miss the viral videos of old. However, companies are doing this more and more to soft-sell their products to new markets. (Enough industry dribble from me). Personally, I think it's dumb college humor funny, but so obviously created by Pizza Hut and I wish they'd set it up better by exposing who they are. I also hope that they compensated the family-owned joints.
Bottom line: It had the adverse affect on me - I now want to go support the local businesses. Was that what you had in mind, Pizza Hut?

i think that advertisers are really trying to reach the audience through new means - and people are just going a bit too far with viral. one of my clients wants to do the same thing and i just don't have the best of hopes for it.

That is utterly rude and stupid. If that weren't a viral ad, I'd have simply thought the guy was an arrogant jerk and deserved to be kicked out (and probably got his butt kicked too). But since it is Pizza Hut...on top of that, it shows them, big business, stomping on small business and being gleeful about it. It would be akin to Wal-Mart airing a viral ad of them laughing at a Going Out of Business sale at a mom and pop store.